A Corpus-Based Exploration of Debates over Helen Keller’s Work and Public Image

Helen Keller’s work has been lauded for confronting disability and battling social inequity but also criticised for its racial orientation, Western prejudice, and fixation on disability. This stylometric study used corpus tools to identify genre-specific linguistic patterns and stylistic alterations within Keller’s oeuvre. A sociographic examination of the most frequent n-grams reveals how Keller’s deafblindness anchors both the positive and negative associations with her persona and how idolisation of Keller as an inspirational exemplar is inseparable from the exploitation and social stigmatisation of her disabilities. Keller frames disabled people as a subject worthy of an audience’s interest, but her first-person pronoun collocations demonstrate that she wields multiple voices that construct different identities in her personal correspondence, published memoirs, and public addresses. The frequency and concordance of proper nouns and keywords add validity to critiques of her sociopolitical positions

Discourse analysis · Fixation (population genetics) · Noun · Persona · Pronoun · Public discourse · Subject (documents) · Disability Rights and Representation · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Gender Studies in Language